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Basketball Great Jerry West: My Struggles With 'Dark Moods'

In an exclusive interview with Jerry West about his new book, 'West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,' Dr. Andrew Weil asks the NBA and college basketball legend how he's learned to live with emotional highs and lows.

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In his new book, Jerry West and his co-author, Jonathan Coleman, relate the story of West's difficult childhood in rural West Virginia followed by unparalleled success on the hardwoods, in college and for the Los Angeles Lakers. Known as "Mr. Clutch" for his skill at making just the right big play in tough games and as "Mr. Logo" because his silhouette is part of the NBA logo, West boasted amazing achievements for a boy from the sticks - but, as he tells the story, he paid a big emotional price for all he achieved.

Andrew Weil: First, I’m interested to know why you wrote West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life, and what prompted you to talk about your own struggles.

Jerry West: Well, I think so many things get written that people think that you’re a little special when you get your name in the newspaper. I’ve never felt that’s who I was. The thing that really drove me in life was the competition, and I think the pleasure and the pain, to be honest with you, that you get from winning or losing.

But I just think I’d read so many things about me that simply were not who I was - people writing things that were completely fabricated or secondhand stories - and more importantly to talk about my struggles with the demons and the challenges I faced in my life and what gave me the ability to be tough enough, strong-minded enough to want to do something different in my life and see something different in my life. And little did I know that was ever going to happen, but I had a very fertile imagination, and also played all these mind games with myself because I just wanted to be in a place that was happier and safer for me. And I could only do it with myself.

AW: I don’t know whether you know about my book Spontaneous Happiness. It's about happiness and depression, and I wrote some of it about my own struggles with depression earlier in my life. I think many people imagine that happiness comes from outside; that you get something you don’t have, or you attain some goal. In my experience, that kind of happiness is often very short-lived, and people who look the most successful or have the most often have an inner sense of something being missing.

JW: As I say in the book, for anyone who battles depression and has had some success, from the outside looking in, people can say, “Well, you’ve had fame. You’ve had people praise you for some of the things that have happened in your life.” They always assume because you’ve had those things and you have money, and unfortunately most people don’t realize how debilitating being depressed might be. It’s the single most difficult thing I’ve had to deal with in my life.

I think an awful lot of it is self-esteem - when you grow up, when you’re young and there’s no love. I grew up in a house that one of my sisters described as an "ice house" - no sign of affection, just people trying to get along. And frankly, I was subject to some brutality on my father’s part, which, I think, denies a person self-esteem. I always felt like I was kind of a stray dog that you see walking down the street, slumped over. Somebody comes up to him, he’s just gonna turn around and kinda growl at him, and or he’s gonna just be there for someone to pat. That’s all I was looking for, and you feel like you’re defenseless against a bully, when you’re seemingly paid no attention to in a large family. For me, I’m different, and I think every family member is different. I just felt the lowest when everyone may have felt that I would have felt the best, and it’s a terrible thing to have to get up in the morning and not know how you’re gonna feel about yourself. But I always had the ability to mask it pretty well, and the only thing you’d probably see if I were in one of my melancholy moods or dark moods, as I call them, would be that I would be much quieter.

AW: Have you found that the process of writing about this and going public about has been helpful for you?

JW: I’ve been asked that more than once. One thing it does is dispel this myth that I had everything perfect in life, and that’s not true, even today. And frankly, the thing I feel best about is that it’s a truthful book. I don’t hate anyone. I don’t really dislike people - though there are probably people I’d rather not have dinner with on a regular basis. I just felt it was something people should read in terms that didn't glorify me as an athlete or as an executive, but [was about] the things that drove me, the things that gave me pleasure, and where I am today in dealing with these problems.

AW: And where are you today? How do you feel that you manage it now?

JW: Well, I’ve always been able to, but I guess when you fight things like this, you’re reluctant sometimes to talk about it. You’re really reluctant, and when you read anything about William Styron [who wrote Darkness Visible, a first-person account of his bout with severe depression], you see how tormented he was. I was struck by how he was impacted by it. I could at least function. He couldn’t function, and here was someone far more brilliant and far more literary than I could ever be. [It's hard] to see someone that talented be so tormented.

I think when I look at it sometimes, “Why does it happen to me?” Well, it happens to a lot of people, and I think everyone has a different way to cope with it. When I was young, there were two words that I felt: envy and jealousy. Because there was nothing in our house, I mean nothing, that would make a kid feel warm and fuzzy. Birthdays were nothing. Christmas was nothing. People would go away on vacations, family vacations. They had a car. We never had a car. We never went on a family vacation. I was so envious and jealous of those people at that point in time. And today, those two words are not in my vocabulary because, I guess, I reap the benefits of having a career and having the ability to afford some of the things I want to afford. But in the long run, [what helped was] just talking about it and maybe opening up to the fact that I am very flawed.

AW: Have you found any strategies that you can use on a day-to-day basis that help you with the worst of it?

JW: Well, as I say, you just don’t know when it’s gonna happen, and I think that’s the most frustrating part of it. I don’t sleep very well because I have a very active mind and, by the way, a very creative mind. My imagination still runs rampant. I’m just not sure how. I think that interacting with certain people, makes me feel great, okay?

The way that I cope with it most is that I love to give. I love to do things for people - not looking for praise, not looking for a thank you. I just love to do things that I hope impact younger people’s lives. I know growing up, I had two or three people in my life who really impacted my life and made me feel they did care about me, and I had an opportunity to see some things that I would have never seen in my house. It just would have never happened, and those people have made a huge impact. But just giving, doing things for kids, there are so many talented kids out there in this world who have lived similar experiences like me and really never had a chance to live their dreams. I have lived my dreams, but they have come with a cost.

AW: Right. You might be interested in what I’ve written because I give a lot of simple, practical things that people can do. You know, I think what you said about helping other people, there’s a lot of scientific evidence about what’s called the “helper’s high” - that doing things for other people is one way of taking your mind off your own thoughts, and it seems to be very useful.

JW: Well, you know, I’m very anxious to read your book because I’ve read so many self-help books and a number of books on how to love your father. And I’m just concerned that that would never happen.

AW: Yeah, this is not like that.

JW: Well, some people can [learn to love their fathers], okay? Some people can. I think in the world I’ve lived in, there’s a lot of petty jealousies that go on. I call it professional jealousy. I really have to be honest with you. I’ve never tried to get into that side of life. To me, the most important thing was always try to be nice to everyone, I don’t care who it was, be courteous and kind, still to this day, regardless of the person, regardless of the circumstance. I still very much like to say, “Thank you, please, yes ma’am, no ma’am.” That’s how I was raised. To me, I’m a very soft person, but there’s a side you probably wouldn’t want to venture into.

AW: I think it’ll be very useful for people to read your story. I think just knowing that people like you deal with the same kind of feelings that many other people do is very helpful.

JW: I think for anyone who has a platform - and I certainly have a platform to do it, and you certainly have a platform to do it - it’s important to talk about it, particularly to have an honest overview of who you really are. This book is a self-examination of a very flawed person. I love to give, I just love to try to help, but on the other hand, I don’t want anyone doing anything for me because I grew up defiant. I grew up with people telling me, “You can’t do this” or ”You can’t do that.” "No" always meant "yes" to me if I felt there was a way to do it, and to this day, the thing that I most care about is giving and trying to help, particularly younger people. Maybe just going up and saying hello, giving someone a handshake, or giving some young kid a pat on the shoulder and saying, "Hey look, this is gonna be okay." Just have goals. Have an imagination, and above all, have courage when sometimes it’s difficult to have courage.